by Deborah Keene, The Blount Scholars Program.
As much as we wish that all of our students arrived at UA having all the skills they need to be successful students. We are aware of the reality that all students have their own strengths and weaknesses. You want to help those who may need the extra guidance without frustrating those who feel that they know what they are doing.
When I was teaching large sections of Geology 101, I tested out a few ways to help the new students learn about college expectations in ways that I think benefitted upper-level students as well. One of these was helping everyone to understand what it means to take helpful class notes.
In order to set the stage, I simply remind everyone on the first day of class that a large percentage of the students in our class were starting college, and that I would be giving them tips for the first couple of weeks. I think this helps the first-year students realize that I care about their success but doesn’t make the upper-level students feel that they were being talked down to.
I also ensure that students have are resources on their Blackboard course page for effective note taking strategies. Some helpful examples come from the learning centers at UNC and Penn State. There are multiple strategies, and they should choose the one that works best for them. You may wish to provide students with resources that explain different note taking strategies, such as these two examples from Oxford Learning and Randoph-Macon College.
By necessity, teaching Geology requires showing a great deal of pictures and learning plenty of new terminology. This leads to two potentially harmful practices: not writing any notes when there are no words on the slide, and furiously copying slides with terminology without fully listening to the explanation.
The picture slides are fairly easy to help with. Once I explain what I want them to understand, I simply state, “Your notes for this slide should…”. For the slides with terminology, I wait for everyone to stop writing before moving on to explanations. Once I finish my explanation, I remind them what the major point of the slide was and encourage them to write that in their notes. The only part of the technique that requires extra work from the instructor is finishing the section or the class with a slide(s) showing what information should be included in the student’s notes at this point. A brief explanation of why is also helpful. Make sure and give them time to compare their notes to the example. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes the first test for students to realize that their note-taking skills need some improvement. Therefore, after the first test is a good time to remind them of the resources on Blackboard and continue showing what helpful notes for that class should look like.
The above method can help the students without adding much time to the instructor’s preparation. However, using a guided notes system, while more labor intensive for the instructor, has multiple benefits for students. It is inclusive, it helps improve test scores, and there is evidence to suggest that it may train students to become better note takers overall (Chen, Teo, and Zhou, 2017).
In my teaching, I used guided notes during a class section on the Geological Timescale. The objective of the section was to help the students understand the general evolution of life on earth as well as the ways in which the earth changed over time both geographically and climatically. In order to demonstrate the larger changes, the students received an enormous amount of information about different species in different time periods, continental movements, and climate change. It is extremely easy for the students to get bogged down in details, not be able to understand which details are important, and ultimately miss the big picture. To help focus them on the important details, I created guided notes in the form of a geological timescale broken into sections with blank spaces for the important information in each section. When we were finished with the section, they had one sheet of paper that would help them focus on the important details while also showing them the big picture. After implementing the guided notes, the overall exam scores improved on this section.
All students, not only first-year students, can benefit when the instructor is proactive in modeling good notetaking strategies. By doing so, you can help students do well in your class and in future classes.